Forbes columnist Steven Salzberg and author-investigator Joe Nickell will each be awarded the 2012 Robert P. Balles Prize in Critical Thinking, to be presented by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry at the CFI Summit in October.

Live Report: Rally to Restore Sanity And/Or Fear, a Plea for Reason

February 25, 2011

John Stewart and Steven Colbert organized
the Rally to Restore Sanity on October 30, 2010. The media reports
of this rally largely described the rally as a light-hearted day of
comedy. Having been at the rally, my sense is that the message
driving the massive turnout of over 220,000 people was much more profound.
It was a rallying cry for reason.

Stewart and Colbert performed for 3
hrs, criticized the irrational and the alarmist rhetoric flooding our
media outlets, and appealed for “sanity”. Many, if not all,
of the readers of the Skeptical Inquirer are aware of the problem.
Many politicians and pundits routinely ignore scientific evidence, and
the public follows their lead. Public figures seem to have
perfected use of the sound bite to appear thoughtful while irrationally
dismissing scientific evidence relating to subjects such as evolution,
global warming or biodiversity loss. Even debates on social policy,
such as health care, regularly avoid the most obvious, irrefutable truth
that the increasing cost of health care is driven in large part by the
aging of our population (reflecting the success of medical science),
and the elderly have more health care needs, and therefore costs, than
the young.

The routine is familiar. Evolution
can be dismissed by reference to the bible. Global warming is
dismissed with the claim that more evidence is needed. Strategies for
avoiding evidence are highly effective for sound bites because they
circumvent any need to describe what evidence would be considered acceptable
and cogent. This journey into surrealism is particularly upsetting
because it leads to bad policies that are ill equipped to cope with
the very real challenges facing our society.

Listening to the news, I often get
the feeling that my desire for “reason” in the public debate is
limited to a tiny, isolated fraction of the population. Attending
the rally, though, provided an entirely different, optimistic perspective.
The crowd was immense, far larger than any of us who came expected.
People streamed into the malls from all sides, filling the streets from
blocks away, and packing together, shoulder to shoulder, on the mall.
The atmosphere was humorous and festive, but the humor reflected a surprisingly
unified message of thoughtfulness. For instance, despite being packed
together, requests to pass were met almost universally with the same
message as people stepped back, and comically announced, “Yes! I will
let you through, because I am a very reasonable person!”

The rally was filled with thousands
of homemade signs most of which addressed the theme of the day in a
manner that was both poignant and really funny. Some of the signs directly addressed the need for reason
in our political debates. For instance, signs proclaimed, “It’s
your brain, Use it!” or “What do we want… Evidence Based Change.
When do we want it… After peer review!” Other signs mocked
the use of signs at rallies to convey extremist views. For instance,
one sign read, “God hates signs” and another sign read, “I disagree
with you, but that doesn’t mean I think you are Hitler.” And finally,
some signs were just nonsensical, such as a sign that stated “Oooh...Shiny!”

John Stewart joked about the diversity
of the crowd, saying facetiously that the participants were a “perfect
cross-section of American society” and making up the percentages of
each demographic. However, the diversity of the crowd was striking.
Attendees were young and old; there were many families (including mine)
and people from states all across the USA. I was also struck by the
large number of women wearing headscarves, in the Islamic tradition.
The intolerance that has infected our political debate particularly
affects the Islamic and East Asian demographics. I imagine that for
some of these attendees, the rally was about much more than light humor.

The use of humor to deliver political
messages conveys a lot about how our brains work. Authors such as Antonio
D’Amasio, George Lakeoff and Sam Harris have written excellent books
on these subjects. Increasing evidence indicates that the beliefs that
we espouse are developed through a complex interplay of knowledge, emotion
and logic. Many of our conscious beliefs originate from pre-conscious,
emotional areas of our brain. Our emotional brain has a surprising
and critical role in allowing us to derive conclusions from knowledge
that is often incomplete. This system plays a primary role helping
us to rapidly evaluate potentially dangerous situations, but interfaces
in almost every conclusion derived throughout our thought processes.

The ideas generated by our emotional
brain are filtered through our logic centers to create the seemingly
rational statements that we use in virtually every aspect of our life.
More knowledge, more security, or more training in logic elicits greater
reason, while ignorance, fear and appeals to “belief” elicit less
reason. Our belief systems also filter acceptance of information.
The emotional brain rejects facts that challenge our belief systems.
One can immediately see how emotional appeals, such as those inciting
fear, eliciting anger or appealing to religious beliefs, could be used
to lead the population towards irrational political outcomes by activating
the emotional brain to bypass more reasoned responses.

The importance of emotion in our actions,
even seemingly rational ones, creates a challenge for “rational”
political debate. Information that questions a belief system is
difficult to incorporate because our “emotional” brain rejects such
material. Knowledge, though, can filter in and impact on
beliefs. Framing arguments in the context of childhood or family is
a particularly effective means of conveying information, because family
and children are emotionally vulnerable topics.

Humor is another effective mechanism
to convey knowledge that might challenge belief systems. Knowledge
or logic conveyed through humor elicits positive emotions, which makes
us feel less threatened and more accepting. The power of John Stewart
and Steven Colbert’s messages lies in their skillful use of humor
to question the many irrational beliefs and behaviors that pervade our
society today. Thus, although the Rally to Restore Sanity was
humorous, for many at the rally, humor was the medium, but reason was
the message.

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Benjamin Wolozin, M.D., is a professor in the departments of Pharmacology and Neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine.

Content copyright CSI or the respective copyright holders. Do not redistribute without obtaining permission. Thanks to the ESO for the image of the Helix Nebula, also NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team for the image of NGC 3808B (ARP 87).